GOP SHOULD BACK OFF ATTACKS ON BIRTH CONTROL

Conservative House Republicans are expanding their rampage through the nation's bedrooms by adding an assault on birth control, which millions of couples use to limit the size and timing of their families.

This assault, part of their ideological war on abortion, is a stunningly stupid move, as illogical as it is politically obtuse.

If the goal is really to reduce the number of abortions, it is counter-productive to interfere with prescription contraception methods, such as the pill, that allow women to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.

It doesn't take Albert Einstein to figure out cause and effect here. No pregnancy, no panicky rush to an abortion clinic.

Politicians have no business trying to legislate morality or meddling in the private sex lives of constituents. That would not seem to be a popular maneuver with couples of child-bearing age struggling to make ends meet in an economy that calls for two-earner households.

Contraception is safe and legal; by freeing women from unplanned or untimely motherhood, the pill and other devices have extended economic and cultural opportunities for our gender and made our advancement in the workplace possible.

The House anti-abortion zealots are pandering to the religious right, which increasingly exerts a stranglehold on the GOP even though its extremist social positions are outside the political mainstream.

Their theological view is that life begins at the moment of fertilization, instantly creating a human being with rights equal or superior to that of the living mother-to-be.

Thus, they oppose birth control devices that can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting and growing in the womb.

That view is not shared by most Protestant and Jewish theologians, who believe that an embryo is not a human until life has quickened and can survive outside the mother's body, in the third trimester of the pregnancy. Indeed, the Supreme Court decreed that abortion is legal because an early fetus is only "potential" life. The high bench actually took the competing rights of the woman into consideration, which the anti-abortion crowd never does.

The House returns from vacation with birth control issues still on its agenda. But the Senate has yet to grapple with such questions, and may never do so. Fortunately, that august body is believed to possess enough common sense to stay away from them.

The opening salvo was recent House approval of an amendment to an agricultural spending bill that forbids the Food and Drug Administration from researching, testing or approving any contraceptive that interferes with pregnancy after fertilization. The measure was specifically aimed at RU-486, a French drug in wide usage in Europe that the FDA has ruled safe and effective but has not yet given final marketing approval.

Bowing at the altar of fertilization, the anti-abortion crowd would deny women access to a nonsurgical, humane "morning after pill" and force them to either bear an unwanted child or have an invasive early pregnancy abortion. This is not about killing babies; it is about protecting women's health.

A second legislative proposal still pending would require civilian federal employee health insurance plans to cover the cost of prescription contraceptives. Most plans now do not. The provision, sponsored by Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., would benefit some 1.2 million women who are federal employees or covered under the health plans of federal workers.

GOP conservatives have vowed to defeat it and temporarily blocked it before Congress went on vacation in June.

The Lowey proposal is attached to an essential spending bill that contains operating funds for the Treasury Department, the White House and several federal agencies. Congress must pass it in some form, with or without the Lowey amendment.

It would be difficult for President Clinton to veto the whole thing just to protest the absence of the Lowey proposal. He has vowed not to approve funding for the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund so long as that funding legislation contains a ban on U.S. funds for international organizations that support family planning.

A similar measure extending insurance coverage of birth control prescriptions to all corporate health insurance plans has been proposed in the Senate, but no hearings have yet been held.

The third effort to cut off safe options for preventing pregnancy is an amendment to another spending bill that would require clinics receiving federal funds to notify parents in advance before prescribing contraceptives to minors.

This, too, flies in the face of logic. Teen-agers are notoriously reluctant to tell their parents if they are sexually active, parents being a bit stuffy about the behavioral purity of their little darlings.

That means no clinic visit and no pregnancy protection. This is not the way to make abortion less frequent.

The new focus on preventing family planning is a sad development for the Republican party, women and the country. The politicians ought to come to their senses and back off.